Billy revealed: "It's a scream, two-and-a-half hours to get ready in the morning, wearing your big hands. I used to love my big hands and I got an extra bit of head and a fat suit and then all my armour to make me wide so I looked small.

"Jimmy Nesbitt and all them are all normal size but they all look like dwarves because they all had that width, it's smashing."

Billy - who also stars in new Dustin Hoffman movie Quartet - admitted he wasn't a fan of the novel.

"No I never read it. And I probably never will. It's not my cup of tea. Youthful society when I was younger was divided into Tolkien and non-Tolkien and I was a non-Tolkien and I didn't like the Tolkien people," he said.

"They were all corduroy and limp wrists and we were all string band people, banjos and bluegrass players and blues players, chasing women about the place, having long hair and they were all talking about the ginks fighting the gonks."